Never After
by S.R Devaste
Summary: Another way that Belle might have gotten into the asylum and out of it again. Because what kind of fool thinks you can beat gravity by /falling/. AU. Belle/Gold, eventually. T for the moment, but adult themes.
1. The Pale Saint

_______AN: This is AU, dark. I wanted to take a serious look of the idea of no fairy tale endings which I think means a lot more than we think it does. Please do check out the musical selections with each chapter.  
_

___**Never After**_

**Prologue**

À la fenêtre recélant le santal vieux est la sainte pale.  
_At the window concealing old sandalwood is the pale saint._

_-Sainte by Ravel  
_

Her bare foot dangles out of the sandalwood windowsill, as an autumn breeze tip-toes down the column of her neck to flirt with the folded corners of her paperback. She shivers, her fingers pressing down the page.

___Once upon a time. _

She often sits here on the second floor of the library, which is less of a floor and more of a indoor terrace made of windows, faded murals and books that very few people want to read. Comparative mythology is most certainly not in vogue.

She's not even really reading the book in her hand either. She doesn't have to. Know one myth and you know them all. Villain thwarted, killed, redeemed—kissed by true love. Happy endings or tragic catharsis, either way there are solutions. That's why people love fairy tales. They would give anything for an ending that makes sense, happy or otherwise. She would at least. In fact, she almost did. When there's a black hole in your chest and it eats every dream you feed it until you don't have any left, you tend to want to die.

She looks down from the window. It's impossible to see the ground below, because this corner of Storybrook doesn't have well lit streets. The library is a new addition to town. Her mouth turns in a way her father would call "touched." Even before her quirks grew cancerous Belle was never quite normal, and there's only one kind of person who looks at a fall with fondness.

One who has jumped.

It's one of the last things she remembers before being locked up, walking past her passed out father on the couch on her way to the bridge, not caring as the tips of her blue slippers got soaked through with wet autumn. She didn't even look down before she pushed off the ledge, because she never really cared for how things appeared to be.

She should have though. Maybe then she would have realized what a fool she was to think she could defeat gravity by _falling._


	2. The Angels Cut Off Their Wings

A/N: The past quote came from the Ravel song Sainte. (Spotify, it's great!) This comes from Schubert's classic Der Mueller und der Bach. (Poetry by Goethe). Every chapter will have one. Gold won't make an appearance for a few chapters yet, but bare with me. I'm checking typos as I go.

_** Never After**_

**1. **

Die Engelein schneiden die Flügel sich ab und gehn alle Morgen zur Erde hinab.  
_The angels cuts of their wings right off and go every morning down to earth._

_-Der Mueller und Der Bach  
_

Her cell in asylum was not hell. Hell would have had heat and color. The asylum was cloud white, cloud soft, and freezing as the ozone. Even with her covering of a straight-jacket and papery hospital gown she was mostly clothed in goosebumps. Every Wednesday, a woman with a halo of raven hair came to visit. Belle might have thought she was an angel, but angels don't smirk.

The woman didn't ask Belle questions, just gave reassurances. "You're doing very well." Placations but never promises, never deals.

One day she came on a Tuesday instead of Wednesday, and this made Belle worried enough to plaster herself to the quilted walls, praying that she was insubstantial enough to just disappear already.

Because the woman didn't just open the slot this time, she opened the door, strolling in as if examining a new apartment. "Hello, there."

Belle said nothing. She never did to the woman, and just because there was no longer six feet of steel separating them didn't mean she would start.

"You make me feel overdressed." The mayor motioned to her dark designer ensemble with a manicured, but unpolished, hand.

"What do you want?" The sound of Belle's voice would have surprised her if she hadn't heard it so many times in her own head already.

The woman shrugged. "What do you think?"

Unconsciously, Belle's hand gripped her shoulders tighter, fingers digging into the place where they always gave the injections.

The woman's smile was as bright white as the walls. "No not that," –a flash of self-indulgent cruelty— "dearie."

"Don't call me that!" Rage welled up in Bell and propelled her off the wall and towards the woman who convinced her father to lock her away for her own protection. Unlike the Mayor, Belle's hands were not manicured, and her jagged fingernails outstretched right for the Mayor eyes.

"Call you what?" The Mayor even her in her heels was faster then Belle and side stepped her, leaving Belle to fall onto her knees.

And the rage was gone. It was always gone. This place sucked it out of her, everything, the dreams, the shame, the pain, the need. All that was left is silence, not even broken by a ticking of a clock.

"I don't k-know," Belle stammered.

"You don't know much do you?" In the naked white room, the Mayor had no need to hide her condescension. Not that she did much anywhere else. "But I do."

The Mayor took a step so that Belle's eyes were now level with her perfectly creased pant leg. "I know about your father."

_He can rot in hell_, Belle wanted to say, but she couldn't. Partially because she knew he already was, drinking from the same bottle, sleeping from the same couch, yearning for the same woman long dead, who Belle was most definitely not.

"Yes," the Mayor hissed out, "he did get rid of you quick didn't he, but then to be fair you wanted to get rid of him first."

"What?"

"Oh, yes. You wanted to get rid of all of us. That's what suicide is. Cowardice and selfishness. Running away from problems you can't bear to solve."

Belle pressed her forehead to the floor, trying to get the mayor's words out of her head. "That's not—"

"The point of my visit." The mayor stepped back. "You're right." From above Belle looked like a subject in supplication. "You're father is dead."

Being so long alone with herself stripped down Belle's emotional defenses, so there was no shock or disbelief. Just pain. The hole in her chest had taken every hope, this room took every sadness, and she had thought that it was enough, that it was impossible that suffering was bottomless. She should have learned to stop doubting the impossible. She should have done a lot of things, maybe if she wasn't—

Tendrils of newly awoken bruise-purple self loathing squirmed around the arteries of her heart and squeezed. It hurts like _oh fuck! _but it also cleared away the haze.

None of this made any sense. The mayor always strove to cause her maximum pain, why did she open the door, why did she come in to tell her the news? Why not show her a picture? There were so many worse ways to tell her then just telling her.

Belle could taste that there was more.

So she picked herself up off her heels, and even though her brittle hair itched against her eyelids as she rose, she still felt triumphant. "What are you doing here?"

"Besides giving you that juicy bit of gossip?" The mayor's eyes widened, before she caught herself and smiled coolly. Then she offered a hand to Belle. "I'm setting you free."


	3. The Old Sin

A/N: Transitional chapter for y'all. I know they're short. C'est la vie.

**2.**

Does this old world grow old in sin alone?  
-The Rape of Lucretia

The Mayor, (call me, Regina) wasn't the one to unstrap Belle of course. No, she got the Doctors to do that, and she watched arms crossed from the other corner of the room. But the moment Belle was free she took Belle's shaking, small wrist into her palm and pulled Belle out of her cell and into what should be daylight.

Belle had imagined what freedom would be like so many times, and it was always a day. There would be a moment of blindness, of readjustment. Things would have been different than they were.

But it was night and Belle could see crystal-clear the aquiline curve of Regina's car, with it's brights cutting through fog. "Come on." Regina hurried Belle into the side door and locks it from the inside once she slips in too.

Belle didn't ask where they were going, because she assumed that they were going to her house, to see her father. Regina insinuated with poisoned euphemisms that "he was still laying there puddles of things that are surprisingly non-alcoholic." Belle had been in a prison of Regina's making long enough to not be surprised by the illegality of it all.

But they didn't stop at her father's house, they drove on further into the night, away from the flickering street-lights to the wild edges of the Storybrook's woods, until the road was the last defense against the underbrush. Even then they don't stop until the road is gravel and the trees loom up on every side, threatening to swallow them whole, and then Regina swerves in diagonally stopping in nothing that could be called a parking space.

With a flick of the wrist like a magic spell, Regina turned off her headlights and got out of the car. The slam Regina's car door echoed, and she walked around to Belle's side of the car. Belle gripped the door handle, trying to keep it closed, but Regina was stronger, and easily opened it from the outside.

Belle blinked once. How could you see any beauty, when even the stars were dim. The small sounds of the forest were covered by the subtle hissing of a persistent wind, broken only by the sound of Regina stepping away from the car, the heel of her stilettos broke the still slightly frosted ground.

"Where are you going?" Belle hated the tremble in her voice, but it was so dark.

"Just a little field trip before I take you to your new quarters."

"I can't see—" Belle gave the hoarse cry of a small animal as Regina's wiry fingers buried into her bicep. All she could think as her larynx burned was, _She said she wasn't going to hurt me there._

"Shhh," Regina hushed, pulling Belle behind her, as she navigated through the sentinels of the thin hickorys and sarcchaine ash.

Belle complied, mostly because she hoped that Regina would stop pulling her arm out of her socket as she dragged her through the underbrush. As they moved deeper into the loamy smells, the preassure eased from pain to discomfort.

At first Belle tried not to stumble over the labyrinths of roots at her feet, but she was naturally clumsy so it was only by the force of Regina's grip that she remained upright. There wasn't even any point in trying.

It left her to focus on other things. The sound of the wind in the distance was going stronger. In fact it was too steady to be wind, it was more like the sound of cars, wooshing through narrow highways. But that couldn't be. They were heading father into the woods, away from the highway.

Her thoughts were cut short, by a collision. They had stopped.

"Foolish girl!" Regina bit out, and suddenly her hand was gone from Belle's arm.

Belle staggered, her hospital slippered feet clutched at the ground. Then to her own surprise it was only a few seconds before she reached out for Regina's hand. But it was gone.

"Where are we?" Belle called, not because she believed she'd get an answer, but because she wanted childlishly to make sure that there was someone was still there.

There was a disturbing similarity between infinite the smallness and whiteness of her cell and the infinite largeness and blackness of the forest at night.

If Regina replied Belle couldn't tell, because the sound was getting louder and louder, cars, wind, but not cars or wind, something else. What if she was crazy, what if the sound was just in her head? Left alone in the woods by Regina. Or what if there weren't any trees at all. What if she was still in the room?

There was three clicks and then familiar light flooded forward more instant than magic. Regina had turned on a flashlight.

Belle knew what that sound was, knew in fact exactly where she was. And she screamed.

The rushing noise was not wind or cars. It was water.

And they were standing on a bridge.


	4. The Forest of My Dreams

Authors Note: Ruh-oh! Taken from the Britten's opera the Rape of Lucretia.

3.

In the forest of my dreams you have always been the tiger.

-The Rape of Lucretia

The beam of the flashlight traced the stony river, it's sloping navy banks, the dark water below, the bow of the bridge, and the crumbling brick edges of it. There were no railings.

Belle's knees tensed as she began to spring up and away. Before she could move the light of the flashlight pressed her down.

"I'm not going to kill you," Regina said flatly. "So if that's why you're trying to run away, don't."

Belle tried to shield her eyes with her forearm, but it was no use, the beam bled through.

"Once upon a time there was a princess."

The light was so bright that even with her eyes closed all she could see was red.

"She was very pretty, but very odd. She lived her whole life with power and privilege, but she never felt like she belonged. All of the ladies wondered why she cared so little for embroidery—cared so little for them, and the men found her so odd that despite her beauty none wanted to marry her."

"And so she grew to hate them, all of them. Even when her father found the most charming prince and betrothed her to him, she found him dull. Soon, because her father tried to make her do her duty and marry the prince, she grew to hate him too."

The cold of the early-spring night hit Belle, then, moving from her toes the bones of her legs. "I don't hate my father."

"Don't interrupt me," Regina's voice was still frighteningly flat. The flashlight flickered away from Belle.

"Take me away from here it's—"

_Crunch. _

Regina's heel, slammed into Belle's ankle.

"There," a subtle color of pleasure in Regina's voice, "that should keep you quiet until the end of my story."

The pain wasn't immediate, but when it did come it was enough to knit Belle's brow and make her mouth open into a little oh, sucking streams of cold-wet air. It wasn't until Belle tried to move, though, that she knew it was broken.

"Ugh," she moaned. Knives of agony fissured up from her ankle to her thigh to her brain.

"And, by the way, you do hate you're father. He's dead."

For a moment there was only the sound of Belles soft keening and rushing water, but all too soon Regina began again.

"He's dead, and you haven't cried once, you've been so focused on getting out of the hospital that tried to make you better."

_He put me away!_ Belle wanted to say, but the pain gagged her.

"And that princess was much like you. So that when war came to her land, killing everything and everyone. She was _glad."_

_No!_ But underneath the pain Belle could taste something more sickening. _Truth. _Odd as it was she could almost remember a war, a land, a fiancé she didn't love. Regina's words were spare, but they painted rich landscapes of burning farms, hulking monsters, midnight war-rooms lit by half-burnt down candles. Smoke and blood.

"Much like you," Regina added offhandedly, "the princess was not all there, sweetie."

Blood and smoke, and for the first time in her life, a little sick bit of excitement. Women were allowed to tend to the battements, to see suffering and sacrifice, to do more than embroider. _My__ life? It's just a story, just some sick story Regina's using to make me feel guilty. _

"So when her father asked an evil monster to end the war, and the monster asked for Belle as a price, she agreed. Not out of any nobility, but because the girl wanted to get away, wanted to have an adventure. So the girl lived with the monster, and because she was strange she soon grew to love the monster. Ectera, ectera."

Regina's voice died off into the rushing of the river. The flashlight turned off, leaving Belle in darkness, but she didn't even try to move.

"But you know, there's this funny little detail about monsters." Regina's voice was so close that Belle could smell her perfume of pressed and dried flowers.

It reminded Belle of gothic castles with port cullis's and long tables that needed to be dusted, and windows with curtains nailed shut. The memories were so specific they had to be real. She had to still be insane.

"They," Regina's hand curled around Belle's unsocked ankle, "can't love." And twisted.

The breath was sucked out of Belle's lungs and she crumpled inward, silently screaming, lips moving closed and unclosed like a dying fish on the dock.

"So," Regina continued perfunctorily, "when the girl fell in love, the monster rejected her, of course"

There was no light any more, and that was why Belle was seeing things she reasoned. For the bricks of the bridge were mutating to the mossy bricks of a dungeon, and the sound of water that of a voice, hissing.

_Go!_

It was hard to tell where exactly the pain was coming from then, her ankle or her heart.

A face flickered in front of her, scaly, dark, with eyes like two polished coins. Inhuman.

Belle blinked, and the face turned into the high-cheeked bone finery of Regina.

"And after he rejected her do you know what she did?"

Belle bit her lip, rocking slightly. It didn't stop the pain, but it changed it, turned it into waves instead of an oppressive ocean bearing down above her. But then something nudged her in her side. A boot. Pushing her closer to the sound of the water.

_Go! Go! Go! Go!_

"She found a bridge, just like this one, just like you did."

Closer still to the edge.

"You said you weren't going to k—"

Even in the darkness Belle could taste Regina's smile like rotten fruit. "I lied."

And Belle fell.


	5. The Dusty World

**4. **

The world feels dusty,

when we stop to die...

We want the dew then

Honors taste dry...

**-Emily Dickinson**

_Why am I not dead? I should be dead._

Belle never drank, but her limbs felt fuzzy with alcohol and Every part of her hurt, the pain was like a sunburn in her muscle, as if her neurons had been frayed.

"Ms. French?"

Belle tried to turn her head to the voice, but found she couldn't. "Mwah."

The blurry figure above her was a woman, definitely, and Belle felt immediate repulsion from that fact, although she couldn't say why.

"My name is Emma Swan, and we need to know if you remember anything about—"

A plump woman burst into the room through the glass double doors, precariously balanced on too small ankles. "I don't care if you're the sheriff here, policy is policy. Family only."

"This police business."

"Do you have an FBI badge, Ms. Swan?"

The sheriff shifted in her cracked-leather jacket, uncomfortably. "Well, no, but, Miss—"

The pudgy woman gave a harrumph as she fiddled with the IV attached to Belle's arm. "That's Nurse Merryweather to you." The woman pointed to her blue nametag.

_The mayor tried to kill me,_ Belle tried to say, but it just came out, "Mwah."

The fugue of the beeping of her heart monitor and various other hospital sounds crescendo, and a pleasant haze descended over Belle.

"There's some more morphine, dear."

Half of a shiver travelled up Belle's spine, before it was swallowed by numbness. _Please, no more. _But her voice sounded far away even in her own head.

_Don't let her come back,_ Belle prayed. Remembering the sound of the water and the pain that still just barely ached in her leg. Then she fell asleep.


	6. The Enchanted Sleep

**5.**

Being drugged (when you're in extreme pain and not in a straight jacket) was a lot like being trapped in a dream, Belle thought. Three days had passed since she had been conscious enough to speak, or even groan. At least, she guessed it was three days. She had fallen asleep about three times.

The blonde woman, Emma, came tried to visit her several more times as well. The mayor, thankfully, never made an appearance. Belle kept waiting for her to. Although she couldn't feel real pointy fear through the haze of medication, the outlines of anxiety were still present.

It seemed as if every time she woke up she had to re-take stock of where she was. A hospital. Alive. (But for how long?) This world always seemed frightening and fast, with all the people flittering about just beyond her doorway. Even if all she saw were there shoes, the rest being blocked out by the blinds.

Her dreams, on the other hand, were much more manageable.

Most of the time they were pleasant, curled up next to a stone fireplace conversing with her father, picking herbs in the marshes in her big goulashes, dancing with her father when they both got lonely on winter's nights .

One time she dreamt of hiding out in the Library behind a stack of books the magical properties of herbs (it was specific details that unnerved her the most) and a troupe of ladies of the court came in, gossiping about her.

"_Just because she's beautiful she thinks she can do whatever she want."_

_"You know she doesn't care about court, doesn't care about anybody." _

_"Poor Gaston, going to have to marry her. She's so **touched." **_

In the dream, even without Regina's warning she knew words were true. She could remember, or well that wasn't the right word but it did for the moment, hiding out in the library, or neglecting her courtly duties to explore the parapets of the castle.

She had been like that in real life too, before her break down, sat alone at the lunch table, reading while eating, never went to parties even when she was invited, always tripped over things, always was too honest or too evasive or too something.

In the dream there wasn't much bitterness from her to the ladies, perhaps because in the dream her father was kind, or perhaps because it was just a dream. In the real world it was different. A paradoxical hate and need of others build up in her veins like plaque until her heart struggled to beat.

Belle knew that Regina didn't tell her that story on the bridge for the hell of it. She told it because it was the thing that could hurt Belle most. It showed a world where Belle had been the same, but hadn't hated, hadn't been selfish enough to jump out of a window. (_Except until she was.)_ But like many things Regina tried, it backfired. Belle began to look forward to the dreams.

Once she even tried to sit up, just to get the nurses attention, just so she might put her back to sleep again. Half way up, spine against the tan plastic headboard of the hospital bed, she experimentally tried to move her hand to her face. It was half to check for damage, half to see if she was even still present.

When her hands touched her face there was a strange ridge where there shouldn't have been, and they came back sticky and red. Then the pain came.

"Breaking your stitches," chided Nurse Merryweather, before putting more drugs into her IV bag.

_ "Make any good deals today?" she asked casually, although her she hungered for any information of the outside world. Was she a prisoner in the castle? It was hard to tell, the dream was so removed from context._

_ The man was small, but his back was straight even though he had sat at the wheel for many hours. "Good for me, dearie." _

_ She hummed through her lips trying to reach a lofty arch with her goose-feather duster. "I see." _

_ The deft motions of his fingers never stopped, but she could feel his slight irritation behind her. _

_ She turned away to dust the gilded grill of a window, but more to hide the small smile that scrunched up her lips. _

_ The regular clanking of the spinning wheel stopped. "Out with it." _

_ "Out with what?" _

_ "You're thinking something." _

_ "Well I'd hope so, I am alive." _

_ His low brogue sounded directly into her ear. "Not for long if you don't tell me what's going on in that little brown head of yours." _

_ She almost jumped, but stopped herself, turned around, and saw that he was right behind her grinning wildly, reptilian yellow eyes glimmering. It should have been a horrifying sight, but Belle felt only a warmth in her chest at his words. He was teasing her, he trusted her enough to tease her. _

_ So, she trusted him enough to tell him the truth. "You say you're making good deals, but you always seem to come back with arms lighter than when you left." Secretly, Belle had hoped that he was softening, giving more than he received. She looked down hiding a blush._

_ Magic was a dangerous thing, his magic especially so. Sometimes it made him utterly foreign, unable to read her, but other times, he was able to know what she was thinking before she did. _

_ It was the latter that worried Belle, maybe he would see that she hoped that it was she who had elicited these changes in him._

_ The smile faded from his lips but not from his eyes. He took a step closer._

_Belle's breath caught in her throat. Ever since the incident where he had caught her falling while trying to unpin the drapes he had kept a religious distance._

_ "Belle, look at me." _

_Even if she weren't bound to him, she wouldn't be able to resist the low thrum of command in his voice, all man little magic. His skin even looked smoother, hands less claw like, but his eyes were the same, wide, yellow and focused on with predator precision. _

_ "Yes?" she replied, trying to keep her voice glib, but it was breathy and shyer than she could ever remember it. Her lips felt heavy. _

_ "Why would I want things?" He drew a single finger up to her face. "Things are mutable, changeable." He turned his hand so his finger pointed upward, pontificating, but still so close to her. "But promises**, favors**."_

_His movement was slow and gentle as he pushed back a curl behind her ear. "They are the perfect debt." His voice dropped an octave from almost paternal gentleness to venom. "And I always collect." _


End file.
